Growing up as a millennial, AI or artificial intelligence, was common throughout pop culture and media. Likely my first interaction with “AI” was SmarterChild through AOL instant messenger. I remember spending a lot of time avoiding homework and trying to trick the bot into saying something it shouldn’t - you know, typical kid stuff. I admit, I’m no longer impressed with Akinator. But you can bet your butt that 11 year old Jimmy was amazed. It felt like some sort of magic. Then I was starting to see more and more sci-fi media growing up: I, Robot (which introduced me to Asimov!) and Spielberg’s Pinocchio story A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Looking back, it seems like AI had a bit of a ‘moment’ in the early 2000’s.
However, this is in stark contrast to today in 2026. We’re fully in the agentic era of artificial intelligence and whew, it’s weird. Never in his wildest dreams would little Jimmy think tech would advance this fast over the course of his lifetime on this earth. The AI from movies and media seemed a thousand years out of our reach technologically. Occasionally, it has me wondering what will I see in the next 30 years.
These days, you cannot escape AI. It’s all over social media, it’s in your phone, it’s on the news, it’s on the protest sign outside of data centers. Hell, it’s even in my car. But is it all useful? Detrimental? We’ll eventually find out for certain, but I’m much more bullish on AI than I ever was on crypto (lol remember NFTs?). Now I use AI extensively at work, beginning last year with Microsoft’s Copilot, transitioning to Anthropic’s Claude today. It is an extremely valuable tool.
Programming is an art. There’s details and nuance. There’s beauty and disgust. Experienced software engineers can skim code and find issues with logic, formatting, and organization - similar to an English teacher reviewing an essay. However, it can take weeks, months, years to fully conceptualize a mental model of how a large system works from just reading code and documentation. Supposedly Facebook is somewhere between 60-100 million lines of code. It’s not reasonable to expect any Meta engineer to be able to describe cogs of Facebook’s system in great detail. We are simply too human.
AI offers the ability to trawl through those lines of code to tweak, summarize, or remove at a moment’s prompt. As a software engineer, it is extremely empowering. I feel like I’ve traded in my chisel and upgraded to some wizard’s staff where I’m wielding the power of many computers at once. My workflow has changed so radically, that it seems weird to go back to programming “off the AI grid”. Almost archaic.
But where do we go from here? I cannot deny that I do think about the environmental ramifications while using AI, the whirring of data centers that are popping up all over my side of the country. The economy that has heavily invested in these companies and the needle that is surely looming around the bubble. I can only hope that it becomes more manageable in the future. I have hopes that locally-hosted models become more powerful and performant, reducing the need for huge centralized data centers. I have hopes that we as a species can start prioritizing our planet over market cap. I have no idea what the future will bring. However, I do know that AI is here to stay.